Manjaro 26.0 Anh-Linh released
Manjaro 26.0
Since we released Zetar in April 2025 we worked hard to get the next release of Manjaro out there. We call it Anh-Linh.
The GNOME edition has received several updates to Gnome 49 series. This includes a lot of fixes and polish when Gnome 49 originally was released in September 2025. You can find find release dates of each upcoming point-release here: Release Calendar. Weekly updates around GNOME can be found here.
Highlights of 49 release series are:
Calendar sees a number of improvements in GNOME 49. The most visible change is the reorganized interface, which is now more flexible, and allows the window to adapt to different window sizes. It also makes it possible to manually hide the sidebar, which is ideal for smaller screens or tiled windows.
Version 49 of the Software app focuses heavily on performance improvements. One major bottleneck has been how the app store parses large amounts of data from Flatpak repositories like Flathub. This release introduces optimizations that greatly reduce memory usage and speed up the parsing process. The result is a snappier, more responsive experience when browsing and searching for apps, especially on systems with limited resources.
GNOME 49 introduces a vibrant new wallpaper catalog that’s specifically engineered for high‑dynamic‑range (HDR) displays and the Display P3 color space. These HDR beautiful wallpapers are possible due to enhanced color-management in GNOME’s window manager (Mutter), which allows it to render wallpapers with their full 16‑bit‑per‑channel RGB depth, giving an unprecedented range of colors and contrast. Image loading backend (Glycin) has also been improved with regard to performance of the color-managed pipelines.
GNOME’s built-in remote desktop capabilities have been extended for version 49, providing more capabilities for those connecting to their GNOME desktops from elsewhere.
The Plasma edition comes with the latest Plasma 6.5 series, Frameworks 6.21 and KDE Gear 25.12. It brings exciting new improvements to your desktop.
Plasma 6.5 includes a number of highly-requested features:
First up: rounded bottom window corners! Breeze-themed windows will now have the same level of roundness in all four corners. If you don’t like this, you can un-round them, too. Another one is automatic light-to-dark theme switching based on the time of day. You can configure which global themes it switches between, and also which themes are shown on the manual toggles on System Settings’ Quick Settings page. As a part of this feature, you can also configure whether you want the wallpaper to switch between its light and dark versions based on the color scheme, the time of day, or be always light or dark.
The Flatpak Permissions page got transformed into a general Application Permissions page, where you can configure apps’ ability to do things like take screenshots and accept remote control requests.
Plasma’s built in Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) server now lets you share the clipboard. You’re also no longer required to manually create separate remote desktop accounts; now the system’s existing user accounts work as expected, and you can just supply their credentials to the RDP client app.
The utility that reads the level of ink or toner from your printer now informs you when it’s running low or empty.
And finally, you can now hibernate your system from the login screen.
With our XFCE edition, we have now Xfce 4.20. Here some highlights: A new file highlighting feature (accessed from the file properties dialog) in Thunar file manager lets you set a custom colour background and a custom foreground text colour – an effective way to call attention to specific file(s) in a directory laden with similar-looking mime types. On the subject of finding files, Thunar includes recursive search.
The panel picks up a pair of new preferences. First, panel length is now configured in pixels rather than percentages, as before. Second, there’s a new “keep panel above windows” option. This allows maximised app windows to fill the area behind the panel rather than maximise its bottom or top edge to sit flush against it.
Control Centre groups all of the desktop’s various modules for managing the system into one easy-to-use window. New options are present in many of these. For example you can disable header bars in dialogs from the Appearance module; show or hide a ‘delete’ option in file context menus from Desktop; and pick a default multi-monitor behaviour before you attach an additional screen – dead handy, that.
Kernel 6.18 is used for this release, such as the latest drivers available to date. With 6.12 LTS and 6.6 LTS we offer additional support for older hardware as needed.
We hope you enjoy this release and let us know what you think of Anh-Linh.
Anh-Linh 26.0 (2026-01-04)
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